ProgrammableWeb

» see programmableweb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2005 every public web API worth knowing about fit on one page. John Musser had been writing them down by hand while scoping an unrelated project, noticed that nobody had made such a list, and put his own up at programmableweb.com with forty entries in it. The timing was exact. Flickr and Google Maps had just started handing out keys, and the word for the thing you built by wiring two of them together was a mashup.

The directory grew the way the category did. It passed a thousand APIs in November 2008, then eight thousand under Alcatel-Lucent, which bought the site in June 2010. MuleSoft acquired it in April 2013 and hired the veteran editor David Berlind that August, which attached a newsroom to the catalog. Through most of the following decade this was where you checked whether a company had an API at all, before you went and asked them.

I cannot tell you when I first landed on ProgrammableWeb, and I do not think anyone can. A directory is a thing you arrive at sideways, from the fourth search result, to read one table and leave. It was never a destination with a habit attached to it, which is why the shutdown passed almost silently among people who had been using it for a decade without noticing they were using anything.

~ the chronicle ~

~ forty entries ~

What made the catalog valuable was that it had been kept continuously since before anyone agreed the category existed. By the end it documented more than nineteen thousand open APIs and thousands of the mashups and applications built on them, which is a seventeen-year record of what the web decided to expose about itself. Kin Lane, who built an entire career as the API Evangelist out of reading the site, wrote when it closed that the posts by Musser and Adam DuVander "is what got me thinking deeply about APIs."

The money underneath it was never the directory. It was sponsored content and paid listings, and when that spending fell off, the arithmetic stopped working: advertising no longer covered the staff and freelancers who kept the thing current. Berlind had already announced in May 2022, after nine years in the chair, that he had decided to move on. Five months later the site published a brief titled "ProgrammableWeb is Being Retired" and gave itself three weeks.

~ the three months after ~

The notice went up on 10 October 2022 and said operations would cease on 31 October. They did, in the sense that nothing new was published. The site itself kept answering in full. The Internet Archive holds complete captures of programmableweb.com at twenty-seven to thirty-four kilobytes through 2 January 2023, through 28 January, and again on 30 January 2023. Then the capture of 1 February 2023 is a two-hundred-and-eighty-one-byte redirect, and every capture after it is either a redirect or nothing.

Wikipedia dates the shutdown to 3 February 2023, which is when MuleSoft said the site was gone. By then it had already been gone for two days. The gap is small and it is the whole character of the ending: funding and editorial both stopped in October, and the catalog went on answering anyone who asked for three more months, until somebody finally pointed the hostname somewhere else. Today the domain has no certificate and returns a bare 404 over plain HTTP.

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